Where They Are Now

Populated by hundreds of nameless characters, Diane Arbus’s portraits conjure infinite imaginary biographies. Ever since the Metropolitan Museum opened its retrospective of Arbus’s photographs, in March, her subjects have been turning up to give their own versions of their lives, an occurrence that is as illuminating and curious as a man in a red turban surfacing at a Van Eyck exhibit. There’s the peroxided wife, for instance, in “A Family on Their Lawn One Sunday in Westchester, N.Y., 1968,” who has been in touch with the museum and is planning a visit. “Child with a Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C., 1962,” is living up to his excitable reputation: numerous people have come forward, claiming to be the boy in the picture. “Identical Twins, Roselle, N.J., 1967,” still dress alike, but their once black hair is permed and tinted strawberry blond. They’ve taken to haunting the galleries, answering questions and posing in front of the photograph that Arbus made when they were children.

“I often wonder how many of us there are,” Lorna Anton, the subject of “A Young Waitress at a Nudist Camp, N.J., 1963,” said recently, speaking from her home, in Pensacola, Florida. Anton’s portrait—which shows her wearing nothing but a silver hairband and a starched white demi-apron—was taken at Sunshine Park, a preserve run by the American Sunbathing Association on more than a hundred acres of piney woods near the township of May’s Landing. From 1961 to 1965, Anton and her parents and her younger brother lived there, in a double-wide trailer with a sign out front that her father had carved to depict four blue jays.

“Arbus came into the dining hall and had a soda,” Anton recalled. “She asked if I had a break coming up, and I said, ‘O.K.,’ not thinking anything really, not that I was destined to be hallmarked as an icon. I was almost thirteen, just at that moment of change, when I was becoming a woman, and here was somebody who was actually very interesting and took an interest in me and wanted to have a photograph, and I thought, Well, O.K., that’s cool.”

It was July, a hot day, so the two walked outside. Lore has it that Arbus often went naked with her nudist subjects, but in Sunshine Park she did not do as the Sunshine Parkers did. (As Anton remembered it, Arbus remained in a tank top and shorts, escaping the sobriquet “cottontail.”) “I said, ‘Well, how do you want me?’ ”Anton recalled. “And she said, ‘Just put your weight on your right leg and put your other leg forward a bit’ ”—a stance that, in the resulting image, emphasizes a nasty cut on Anton’s front shin. “Then she said, ‘Just kind of look over my shoulder,’ which I did. She took maybe one or two shots, and then she said thank you and we smiled and off she went.” The print that Arbus chose shows the dining hall and, in the middle of the frame, Anton—a Kritios boy with blond, teased hair and nubby breasts. Her restive expression seems to issue a challenge. “There were so many things that interested me in life, and so many things that I wanted to do,” Anton explained. “I really was feeling, I think, that I was about to enter on a quest.”

Anton made little of the encounter until, several years later, she and her parents received a large manila envelope with a typewritten letter. “The Museum of Modern Art in New York City is arranging a show of my work and I would like to ask your permission to display a photograph of Lorna which I took of her in Sunshine Park in 1963,” Arbus wrote. “I am enclosing a print of the photo for you to keep. This is a great honor for me and would be a great honor for Lorna as well.” (Anton reread the letter so many times that she committed it to memory.)

By then, the nudist idyll was coming to an end. SPF was replacing baby oil and iodine, and Anton and her family had moved to a split-level house in May’s Landing proper. “With puberty comes modesty,” Anton said. Furthermore, the family-centered postwar ethos of nudism had given way to a more libertine strain. (In 1948, the New York Post columnist Earl Wilson wrote, of a visit to Sunshine Park, “If your wife wears a nightgown at breakfast, don’t cuss her. Congratulate her. I looked rather thoroughly at these nude women and believe me . . .”; in 1963, the film “Have Figure, Will Travel” chronicled the exploits of three bachelorettes on a yacht tour of the Eastern Seaboard’s clothing-optional camps.) Together, Anton and her parents discussed the merits of participating. “My father said, ‘Well, there will be a certain amount of notoriety. Do you want to do this?’ ” Anton said. “I slept on it and woke up and said yes.”

The ensuing years of Anton’s life have been, like anyone’s, mundane and extraordinary: war protests, marriage, parenthood; pottery, medieval reënactments, health problems. For years, Anton kept her Arbus in a safe-deposit box, but when business debts mounted, in the nineties, she sold the print to a broker in San Francisco. (Last month, a print of the Anton portrait went for a hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars at Sotheby’s.) The Met show has got her thinking about the golden days of May’s Landing. “I miss the wonderful environs of the park,” she said. “It ran along the Great Egg Harbor River, a tidal river. The water was the color of root beer, from the cedar trees, and we were always finding arrowheads and axe heads and chips of flint, because the Lenni-Lenape Indians had lived along those banks. There was black clay along the banks. We used to goof around and rub our legs in it and say, ‘Oh, I’m having a mud bath!’ ”

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